Generalized algebraic data types (or GADTs) are a powerful tool that can augment algebraic type systems enabling them to be far more expressive. In addition to enabling polymorphic recursion, they also serve as a fundamental unit for existential types. In this post we will look at what all of those phrases mean, and how GADTs can be used in practice.

Another year, another DEF CON. This year, from the far reaches of LegitBS’s wild imagination came an architecture so bizarre and so confusing that it was actually pretty good. Over the course of three days, we were introduced to cLEMENCy, an intriguing RISC architecture that sported 9-bit bytes, middle endianness, and reversible stacks. It took many sleepless nights, but once again the were able to tool and exploit our way to a tight victory. As a member of the Plaid Parliament of Pwning, here is an overview of the year’s biggest CTF from my perspective.

Defcon CTF 2016 was held from August 5th to 7th during the annual Defcon conference. This year DARPA chose to host their Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) — a CTF-style competition between fully autonomous Cyber Reasoning Systems (CRS’) — at Defcon as well, so the Legitimate Business Syndicate oriented their competition around it to allow the winning machine to compete against the human teams. The new format brought with it several interesting gameplay mechanisms as well as a couple of issues, resulting in a fun but occasionally problematic contest. During the competition I played with the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), with whom I placed first. This is a brief reflection of how the game operated, what succeeded, and what did not.

While language and grammar are undoubtably linguistic constructs, they have very practical uses inside the realm of computer science. However, while looking for language and grammar parsing tools written for Node, I was disappointed to find no easy-to-use and suitably-flexible libraries. In response, I began development on Tyranny, a node module that allows for the description and parsing of arbitrary context-free grammars. Here is what it is, how it works, and what it does.

Over the past few weeks, I have begun working on a set of tools called hakkit for helping me to write CTF scripts in node.js. Many of the ideas are lifted off of pwnlib, but soon after I started, I realized that by utilizing Node’s stream APIs, I could take my tools a step further than the pwnlib ones. By behaving similar to unix file descriptors, Node streams allow for powerful and extensible data manipulation.